Where Is New Physics Hiding, And How Can We Find It? (Synopsis)

Ethan

2 years ago

The particle tracks emanating from a high energy collision at the LHC in 2014. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Pcharito, under a c.c.a.-by-s.a.-3.0 license.

“Reality is what kicks back when you kick it. This is just what physicists do with their particle accelerators. We kick reality and feel it kick back. From the intensity and duration of thousands of those kicks over many years, we have formed a coherent theory of matter and forces, called the standard model, that currently agrees with all observations.” -Victor Stenger

The Standard Model plus General Relativity gives tremendous successes, and has so far accurately described every small-scale, quantum interaction (for the Standard Model) and every gravitational phenomenon (for General Relativity) ever tested, measured or observed. Yet there are still a whole host of unanswered questions about physics, including the puzzles of dark matter, dark energy, strong CP-violation, neutrino masses, baryogenesis, quantum gravity and more.

The Standard Model of particle physics. There must be more to nature than this. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Latham Boyle, under c.c.a.-by-s.a.-4.0.

We aren’t simply relegated, however, to looking for these answers at the LHC or other high-energy colliders. There are also insights from weak coupling and large statistics, high precision and indirect measurements, tabletop experiments, cosmic scale features and more.